


Leave Already

by orphan_account



Category: Invader Zim
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, And Zim's not letting go, Colourblind!Zim, Dib is dead, Just something I was playing around with, M/M, Mentor/Protégé I guess, Resisty AU, Swearing, Unhealthy - Freeform, might make a series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-11
Updated: 2016-01-11
Packaged: 2018-05-13 05:21:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5696527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Waking up is hardly a surprise anymore.<br/>It happens and you can’t stop it, so you let it happen. You wish it didn’t but you can’t have everything. That’s a lesson you’ve learned enough times.<br/>So you get up and you try to carry on as normal. You hit the call button to show you’re awake and you get out of bed.<br/>Everything’s harder now.<br/>You slip into his jacket.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leave Already

You didn’t know what to do when he’d- . When that had happened.

It wasn’t even as if anything had been planned out beyond where you’d been at that point. It wasn’t even as though you’d planned for anything. It all just happened, and like the needy little shit you are, you went along with it. You kept some control because you’re not a _complete_ idiot, but you’re starting to feel like one now.

But as a well-trained soldier, your level of control is pretty high. Stupidly high. _Some_ control is nothing. You had completely given yourself up and even whole planets had never been that pitiful. He’d never done you wrong, though. He’d never do that. He knew just how fragile and close to breaking you could get, so he never pushed you. Sometimes, you wish he had have done. Just so you could finally break into little pieces and not have anything to do with him ever again.

Now, though. You just want him back.

So you try your best to get on with things like nothing’s changed. You wear his things a lot of the time. You wear his coat every day. It’s too big, by nature and by the stretching of years of growth that hadn’t really stopped, but it smells like him. The cologne he sometimes bothered to put on, the sweat of running from authorities and criminal gangs with you, his general musk.

It makes sense to wear his things. It does. He was your unexpected partner in fighting back the tide of bloodthirsty Irken warriors. And for only a short time, he was yours. It was mostly in your dreams that your encounters were of the more risqué variety.

Oh, the dreams. And they still happened. If you believed anything he had tried explaining to you over the first few years, you’d think he was haunting you.

You’re not even supposed to have dreams; Irkens can’t dream, can you? You can’t sleep, your PAK shouldn’t allow it. That was something you’d decided to completely ignore. He said sleep was an experience and you got jealous. You wanted something you couldn’t have so you forced your PAK to accommodate it. With his help, of course. Everything was always with his help.

Fancy that, a human knowing just as much about your technology as you without even trying. You’re a desperate little traitor. But that goes without saying.

Well, as soon as word somehow got to Dib on that admittedly horrendous planet, the scrawny little eleven year old Dib, he was on the lookout each night. It was a wonder no one else had seen you coming in to land.

From that point on, you were not left alone. He was always either watching you from a distance or watching you very closely. One of the others, Skoodge you think it was, had blabbed to him about your mission. And that was when you really weren’t left alone.

Instead of just being watched, he’d try talking to you, try getting your attention. He tried everything to get to know you and why you’d want to help his planet from a foreseeable invasion of the Irken kind. In the beginning, he was just another majority, someone you had to just ignore.

If only you had have known that he would turn out to be the closest person you had ever had. If only you’d have known how short a time you had with him.

Dib Membrane. What a cocky bastard he’d grown up to be. A handsome creature, too.

Sure, you didn’t know much about the planet you were trying to protect from another deadly Organic Sweeping, but you had done it countless times before without any context. But the human had insisted on helping in some way or other, and the knowledge he had was (you sigh) quite useful. It didn’t change the fact that all the other rescues had worked out well enough – you had an inside look of what was going to happen after all, since you’d been trained there for almost a century. Everything was predictable for you. You were one of the best.

And once Dib had realised that, once you had single-handedly destroyed the canon’s mainframe and saved yet another planet, there was no hope for you. Everything you did was to impress him, to show him how tough you really were on the inside as well as the rough exterior. Somewhere along the line, some aspects of the roles had reversed. You like to think that Dib had tried impressing you just as much, but sometimes he hardly had to try. But Dib’s starry-eyed wonder had gone after a few years of space travel, and you lived for making it return, even for a moment or two.

Your greatest results came from doing something you weren’t good at all.

Being _kind_ , of all things. Yeah, you ended up saving billions of creatures on his planet and on many others, but it didn’t mean you were any different. You were (are? Yes, you are) still an ignorant ass. There was no helping that. There still isn’t. But Dib never changed; he was always good-hearted (much to your displeasure) and enthusiastic.

He'd always been a fast learner too. By the time the Resisty and its newest member were on a mission to save another planet only years later, Dib had been trained up, suited up and armed by only you. It was obvious that the kid had taken a liking to you, and when the traditionally informal voting sprang up to declare who was to be the newest recruit’s mentor, the others shied away. You had suspected it was because Dib was only a smeet, and a human (of which no one, including you, had any experience with), but you later found out that Dib hadn’t taken a shine to anyone but you.

Pride. And then overwhelming dread. The smeet could talk for the whole Universe, and had questions that even you had to fabricate answers to. A lifetime by their standards studying all things science and fighting couldn’t prepare anyone for the torture you endured while teaching him almost everything you knew. You’d never taught anyone anything and your solution to a pestering voice had always been to shoot at it.

The beginning had been… difficult. Dib had been enthusiastic enough, but that had been the problem. One time you remember well was when you’d introduced him to the weapons used by the Resisty. In layman's terms, bits of other weapons shoved together to make an overall more powerful firearm. You taught him how to handle things, what they were called and how to wire bombs; for defusing and activation purposes alike. You taught him demolitions; your most favourite and go-to job.

You turn your back for one second (to reach up and get that hand grenade they always put back up there) and the kid’s made a ticking time bomb out of an assortment of what you’d gone through with him. It had been pretty spectacular (you had thought first of all, though you never told him), but in that moment, all you felt was fear.

And not the self-preserving fear that had always been at the back of your mind in every situation you somehow found yourself in. ZiM, the mighty fucking Irk- _Ex_ Irken Invader, had actually spared a thought for someone else who wasn’t a majority. A single being.

After an episode of trying not to panic, he had quickly flicked the activation switch to off and backed away. You’d given the human the most deadly glare you were able to and only pointed at the door silently. Since it happened a lot he knew exactly what you meant and tried not to look too pathetic as he had trudged out the room to await some sort of telling off in the corridor.

You had immediately turned back to the device and you can still remember it now. How the smeet had pickpocketed different ammunitions and catalysts, you had no clue. You had taken things apart and wondered how on Irk you’d never tried some of the combinations. A particularly creative combination involved a spear laser (of the more dangerous variety) and a toxic starburst effector. If the bomb’s inexperienced creator had have accidentally set it off, it would have created the most splendid display. Of guts and blood, surely.

Dib Membrane, the now-thirteen year old, had just created the most effective demolition used in the Resisty today. The Spearburster, of cataclysmic proportion. It has won wars in later years, some he had been alive to witness, others not. And a smeet had smacked them together to see what would happen.

You kept that little creation to the side for him to pitch as you disabled everything and threw away the scraps that made it look more clunky and in the way. That was the day things changed and wheels began turning. The day Dib was given his first real assignment, the day you realised he had a gift like you, the day you began to treat him more like an equal.

You remember things well, how antsy you were of how his recon job was going and how you checked the tracker you had slipped into his drink every ten minutes to see if he was still moving and not caught. Not dead.

That hardly mattered now. He really was (is, is, is) gone and there’s nothing your pitiful ass can do about it except cry.

No amount of trackers or defensive armour shields could have helped it. Nothing you could have done would have been worth it. Not even the medics. They did try, but humans aren’t meant to last. They’re stupid and weak and fragile and breakable.

It’s almost not worth crying over. But a single bullet to the head sure is.

You fall asleep crying again and promise yourself (just like every night) that you won’t tomorrow.

You are an expert in the field of how easily promises are broken.

 

 

Arms are wrapped around you as you awaken, and you’re too stunned to breathe. Your body goes as rigid as the uncomfortable beds and you think for (possibly) the last time that you really need to buy a mattress of your own after all these years, because this one sucks. But then the severity of the situation batters its way through the sleepy haze of your mind and you’re back on alert again.

The familiar light pink you used to be accustomed to waking up to is all you can see, with black hairs cropping up. But-

It couldn’t-

“Shh.”

The soft breath of air hits you square on the forehead and you can’t keep your train of thought. It’s him. It’s him. Your lip trembles and you feel overwhelmingly happy, but you don’t know why.

“Dib.” You whisper, and it’s everything you want it to be. There’s a pause and you let the feel of it roll over your tongue again.

“What’s wrong?” The hand tracing idle circles at your back stops as he pitches his head down to try to look into your eyes and you only just notice it was there. It lays flat against your spine, nestled just beneath your PAK, and it feels like you’re being urged closer. You fill the miniscule gap that feels like a gaping canyon and clutch on for dear life. You push tears away because you’re not like that. You don’t cry in front of him.

Dib’s chest vibrates with deep rumbles and you know what it is. You know he’s laughing that fucking annoying laugh. You only hold on tighter.

“I haven’t even been up to piss yet. You can’t be that upset.”

You laugh because that’s the only thing you can do to save yourself from having a complete breakdown there and then. It sounds and feels wet and you realise that you’ve already started crying and that wasn’t a laugh, just a sob. _So much for that_ , you tell yourself as he moves away.

When the mattress springs up ever so slightly in a calm manner, you know he’s gone. You force yourself to close your eyes instead. The image of him shucking his shirt on plays over and over in your mind and you just want him back in bed with you.

But then it dips back down again and there’s a warm hand on your cheek that doesn’t bother to wipe any tears away. Instead, it ushers you out of your fucking pathetic curl and makes you look at him through your defective implants.

His face is kind and his brown eyes scan yours. He told you way back when he first found out you’re colourblind that his eyes were amber. ‘ _I’ve never heard of that’_ , you’d told him dismissively with your back to him as you'd collected certain things from your stolen, beloved Voot. He said, ‘ _It’s kind of brown and yellow mixed together. Yeah… it’s weird, I guess.’_

_‘I’ve never heard of yellow either.’_

You fancy that you can see yellow in Dib’s eyes right about now. Despite it not being on your spectrum, Dib’s eyes look different. They look good.

They look false.

“Zim, I can’t help if I don’t know what’s wrong.” He murmurs with concentration, and you watch his lips barely move. You can tell he’s focusing on something. The tears have stopped, purely by will power, and they’re drying now. It feels strange.

“Dead.” You whisper, and you have to move your neck to let the air get through your dry, closed throat. The word alone makes you want to shut everything out. Pretend, pretend, pretend.

“Dead?” Dib murmurs again, and he looks away for the first time to the sheets beneath the both of you. His nose scrunches up in that funny way you’ll never understand and he looks back up to you as he pushes his glasses up quickly, “You were dead?”

You shake your head with exasperation. How could such a smart creature miss that? You want to speak but your throat’s closed up fully again, so you don’t. The pink tint of his skin (which he told you was a very pale peach) calls to you but you don’t touch him. Things are dawning now and you don’t want them to.

_Stay, stay, stay._

“…Me?” The hand that’s been resting on your cheek moves to hold your jaw affectionately and you notice his thumb pressing softly where the beginnings of an ear would be.

“You know as well as I do that every day is a risk in this line of work.”

_Please no._

It’s wrong. Dib would never say something so unhelpful. You choke back tears as you watch Dib’s expression go neutral, then it switches back to the kindness he wore just moments before. _No, no, no, no._

“I wouldn’t leave you.” It retries, but you’ve heard enough. The tears roll past and it repeats itself. You bury your face in your hands.

“I wouldn’t leave you.” You’ve seen it enough times to know. You’ve lived long enough to realise that you can’t hang on to things for ever. The dream doesn’t seem to realise that.

“But you did.”

 

Waking up is hardly a surprise anymore.

It happens and you can’t stop it, so you let it happen. You wish it didn’t but you can’t have everything. That’s a lesson you’ve learned enough times.

So you get up and you try to carry on as normal. You hit the call button to show you’re awake and you get out of bed.

Everything’s harder now.

You slip into his jacket.


End file.
